Release Notes 1.3-final
Confluence 1.3-final is the stable release of Confluence 1.3. Woohoo! We made it! The full release-notes for Confluence 1.3 are located here, this page documents only the changes made since the 1.3-DR4 development release.
1.3-final contains over 100 improvements over 1.3-DR4, mostly focused around fixing bugs, polishing the interface, and making Confluence ready for a stable release.
Who should upgrade?
Confluence 1.3 is the new stable release of Confluence. It contains a huge raft of enhancements and fixes made since 1.2.3. If you are running Confluence (and not using Oracle, see below), you should upgrade to Confluence 1.3. If you are not running Confluence, you should install 1.3 immediately, regardless of your database.
Current users of Confluence on Oracle databases users may wish to delay upgrading.
Upgrade Procedure
Upgrading Confluence should be pretty easy. If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.2 or higher, you can find instructions here. We strongly recommend that you backup your confluence.home directory and database before upgrading!
If you are upgrading from Confluence 1.1.2 or earlier, be sure to read the upgrade instructions in the Confluence 1.2 release notes.
Note: You will need to rebuild the search index after you upgrade for certain features (including mail threading) to work properly.
New Features in Confluence 1.3-final
New Demonstration Content
As part of the DR4 setup improvements, users were given the option to install an example space, but the demonstration content that was loaded was pretty uninspiring. For the final release, the demonstration space now contains a suite of demonstration pages, examples of what Confluence can do, and a few pictures of the Sydney Opera House. This should make it much easier to get Confluence up and running quickly.
Referrer Performance Improvement
We discovered (from monitoring the http://confluence.atlassian.com site) that our recording of HTTP referrers was causing some serious performance problems for public Confluence sites. Upgrading to Confluence 1.3-final should make Confluence a lot more responsive, especially under heavy load.
Improved Notation Guide
The notation guide has been reorganized to be more user-focused, making it easier to find the markup or macro you are looking for.
It is also now possible for macro plugins to insert themselves into the notation guide. Just write your macro description as a two-column HTML table row, put it in a vm file, and include the following in your atlassian-plugin.xml file:
<resource type="velocity" name="help" location="/path/to/your/helpfile.vm">
<param name="help-section" value="tables"/>
</resource>
The help section can be one of: texteffects, headings, breaks, links, lists, images, tables, advanced, confluence, external or miscellaneous. If you don't include a help section, it will be put in the 'macros' section.
Improved Search Indexing
We've updated the way we index content within Confluence. A lot of searches that came up empty before will now find something. In addition, you can now set your primary language for indexing under General Configuration, so that the indexer can better optimize itself for non-English content.
Also
- By popular demand (it was our most highly voted-for bug), pages are now exported in alphabetical order, not in order of creation.
- The Remote API can be accessed anonymously, if you wish (anonymous remote access must be turned on in the general configuration).
- When previewing a page, you can continue to edit on that screen, instead of having to go back to the edit page.
- The thread view on a mail page has been improved, and the full-thread view is no longer a pop-up.
- You no longer need to be in the
confluence-admingroup to access the administration pages, you just need global administrative privileges - You can link to anything in Confluence if you know its ID in the database (currently this is how you must link to email): [$1234]
- You can link to anything relative to the root of the Confluence site (useful for pointing to parts of the site that can't otherwise be linked): [///pages/editpage.action?pageId=1234]
- New macros: {jiraportlet}, {note} {tip}, {information} and {warning}
- A lot more...
Issues Resolved for 1.3-final
In all, over 130 issues were resolved between DR4 and 1.3-final. Unfortunately, merging all the versions together in JIRA means the list of precisely what went into those 130 has been lost, but if you sort this list by last-modification date, you'll get some idea... Issues Resolved for 1.3